I remember (I hope, accurately) that when I was trying to use Sibelius, there was the facility to save ideas, phrases, etc in a separate location as a place where these could be stored, to be accessed as a kind of resource when necessary. It was not included by the main part of the program, but was useful for the occasional theme, idea etc, which could be taken into the music being composed.
Is there anything like this in Dorico ? My wife is an artist, and often she takes a drawing book with her when we are able to go out, and often uses it to include ideas of sketches, which she can then use as an aide memoire when she is painting.
Dorico doesn’t have a dedicated feature for this, but you can add as many “scratch” flows as you want within the same project, then exclude them from the final layout.
I have found the info in Sibelius 7.5 user guide, and the section is all about ‘ideas’, which seem to be an extra facility for users to put any thing which would be useful, to be used at a future date. Section 2.3
Surely, adding ideas to a project, and then deleting them at the end would mean that these ideas could not be referred to , modified or used in future would be a bit of a waste, wouldn’t it ? I suppose creating a project called ‘Ideas’ could be one way of at least keeping those thoughts, improvisations etc for use at a later date, but a project approach seems to be a rather complicated way to work.
Perhaps an option to be added to a future version of Dorico ?
As hrnbouma said, you can still achieve this with extra flows. It’s one of their intended uses. Just exclude the extra flow from the layout. This works more o less the same as Sibelius ideas do.
You save them within the project. You can also import them into another peoject if you wish. If you mean if you can save them in a library common to all projects, then no, you can’t. But of course you can keep a project called ideas with all your flows and import them at will into whatever project you need.
If you want, create a project just for “ideas”, and import the flows into your real projects as you need them, or just copy/paste the notes from one project to another.
I am afraid that new questions come to mind: I am sorry about this, but please bear with me.
The first questions is a basic one: what is a Project - a complete work, but without notes ?
What is a flow ? These have notes, but are not something which is capable of being used without being part of a project - am I right ? Can these be saved on their own, or must they be in a project ? How many flows can there be in a project ? Is it possible to see in a project when it switches from one flow to the next ?
If I save flows of different ideas within a project called something like ‘Ideas’, how can I use it in another project ? Can it be ‘cut and paste’ , or do I add the flow to the main work I am putting together, and will the key which the notes in a flow are, will this make changes to the main project ?
You can see how mixed up I am getting about the way in which uses its parts, but it still seems to be a bit confusing. I am sure this only short term, and any help would be much appreciated.
Each Flow can be saved separately as a .dorico file, essentially as a Project of one Flow. You can import one or more flows from any project into another project. The Flow contains all the information for the music, so key signature, Time signature, players, etc.
A “project” is just a .dorico file, and it can contain any number of flows. (Well, there may be a practical limit, but it is certainly several hundred.) You can give the flows meaningful names instead of the default “flow 1”, “flow 2”, etc.
You can import one or more flows from one project into another with (unsurprisingly) File / Import / Flows.
You can also export one or more flows to create a new project.
Alternatively, you can have two (or more) projects open in Dorico (in different windows that are both open at the same time, if you want) and copy-and-paste music from one to another - but that can be slow for large projects, because Dorico has to set up the playback for the active project every time you swap from one to another.
Import and export have the same effect as copy-and-paste. They don’t create a dynamic link between the projects. So you can edit the imported music without affecting your “ideas” project.